All In The Name Of Living (NieR: Automata X Reader)

chapter 1: Awakening

In an underground facility, bellow an aged and broken city, lay multiple cryo pods.

Each and everyone looked the same, all faded of the colours they once had with the march of time, and all in the same room

All line up against the walls of the facility and making a path towards a computer at the other end.

But all of them were empty, well, all but one. Inside one closest to the computer, lay a young looking woman with long snow white hair.

She had slept peacefully for years inside that pod, features frozen in time from the day she had stepped into it.

Yet, why was she the only one? With how many there were within the facility it seemed set to house many more of her kind.

Minutes passed with no signs of life within, and then hours, and then days, that's how it had been for years. The facility ran by itself.

Sustaining its power through many ways to power the computer and single pod in use, to make sure the young woman stayed asleep for as long as possible.

Until one day something failed.

All of a sudden the power cut out but it wasn't long until the back up power started but that didn't last for as long as it should have done.

Something was draining power from the surrounding area.

And with it came the inevitable awakening of the white haired girl.

It took a few hours for her to finally open her eyes. They were e/c in nature but there seemed to be hints of something else as well within them.

She slowly sat up as her mind fought to wake up.

'Where...am I?' she thought to herself

It was a second after that thought that guilt flooded through her at her memories.

All at once she wanted to scream and shout and cry at herself for what she had done and what she had left behind but she stopped herself.

She numbed herself to her feelings.

'Like you deserve to do that...'

She ignored that voice.

She soon willed herself to get up and move towards the computer.

While power had been lost for her pod the computer still ran but she knew it wouldn't be for long.

She started to operate it with ease. While it had been a long while since she had done so she still knew her way around.

She read the documents that were specified as urgent to read but it was all just things she knew, nothing had changed with the destruction of that project but deep down she had wished there was.

Her movements stilled with as she read over the confirmation in the documents... She wished she felt something as she read those words but she didn't.

Because she had come to terms with what was written before she entered the facility.

She turned away from the computer with a sigh and move towards her cryo pod and leaned down to open a compartment on its side.

Inside lay a lone white spear.

She picked it up with practiced ease and stood back up and twirled it in her hands just to see if it had changed in someway.

She smiled as she came to the conclusion that it hadn't and with a flick of her right wrist it disappeared in a flurry of white and light blue light.

And with that she set off towards the exit, after all there wasn't much left for her here now.

As she walked around the building her footfalls barely made a sound but that was the usual for her.

Everything in her early life had been mapped and monitored, including combat training, the soundless steps had just stemmed from countless hours of forceful training.

She soon made it to the exit and wasted no time leaving, slamming the doors of the facility open and climbing the steps up to the surface.

She stopped when she reached the last step as she remembered a moment from her childhood and she just had to pause.

A soft smile graced her features as she reminisced on that moment before coming to the realisation that she wouldn't meet the two people she had first meet ever again.

'No I can't keep thinking about what's happened in the past... It won't change anything now. What's happened has happened and I can't change that no matter how much I wish I can...'

She thought as she placed her hands onto the half broken doors intending to push them out of her way.

She felt many emotions as she did so, some her while others...

She shook her her and then pushed, the doors came free easily and fell to the floor with a dull thud.

Stepping out into the world by herself wasn't new to her but it certainly felt like it was the first time all over again.